> so long story short i was trying to make an old x86 laptop boot into a > live cd environment i could use, but i didnt have a livecd so i used > debian’s install cd, but i wanted to try out guix > > When i copied files off the guix cd the kernel would spew errors > (earlier oops). debian 12. > > So of course i made an iso of the cd figured it was a hardware thing > but no this iso also upset the kernel to read files from, and they’d > come out corrupt > > I tried some iso tools from the debian cd and they seemed confused too > > So i didnt know if my guix cd was bad, or debian was bad, or the > laptop was bad. I checked the hash and signatures and the cd seemed > good, which was quite slow to do in the old system without tools > > So of course i strace’d the tools to figure out what logical offsets > the data was at and began reverse engineering iso966- by inspection to > see if i could make further progress, which i did, slowly > > …
long story short it looks like the kernel on debian 12’s install cd has zisofs bugs, and i got to write an iso9660 decoder in my tmpfs mount that processed shared system use data and rockridge and zisofs zisofs is _poorly documented_ nowadays. It looks the official documentation is within a linux userspace tool repository now —
